The Paradise Key (Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 5)

by Nick Thacker

“An hour? That seems fast. How’d you catch it?”

  “I have an RSS feed that scans for keywords and pulls down anything related to my search queries.”

  Ben nodded as if he understood what she was talking about. Julie nodded because she did know what she was talking about.

  “Unfortunately I wasn’t keeping downloads of the articles, and I can’t find any cache results with the content anywhere online.”

  “So it’s gone,” Ben said.

  “Sort of,” Sarah answered. “I, uh, have somewhat of an eidetic memory. It’s been useful throughout my life, but I can’t control what my mind decides to retain.”

  Reggie looked over at Dr. Lindgren with a renewed interest. “I’m guessing this article wasn’t one of those things your mind decided to keep filed away?”

  She shook her head. “No, not all of it. Just the first page, which I could recite to you. But it was severely limited in detail, and while I remember a bit about the second and third pages of the publication, I don’t recall the specifics.”

  “What's the gist, Dr. — Sarah —” Ben said, “why’d you come along?”

  “Well, it’s why I came to talk to Reggie after dinner. I would have come to you two, first, but…”

  “I was closer,” Reggie said. “Right?”

  Sarah smiled. “Right.”

  “Go on,” Julie said, not a little bit of strain in her voice.

  “Right, sorry. I reached out to Mr. E and asked if he had information about this park. He got back to me right away and told me he was sending a team of three, and that I was welcome to come along, all expenses paid.”

  “Interesting.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. But I understand why you’re here now, and I can assure you I have no knowledge about Ravenshadow or the man who killed your teammate.”

  “That’s fine, Sarah. No need to apologize,” Reggie said. Julie half-expected the man to reach out and place his hand on her leg.

  “The article gave me some clues, but I’m here to figure out the rest, if possible. The article was about a shipwreck.”

  Julie’s eyes widened. “Like Crawford said. This park is right on top of a shipwreck.”

  “Right,” Sarah said. “It was built on top of the wreck, actually. And if the article is to be believed, they began dredging the wreck and draining water from it.”

  “Whoa,” Reggie said. “That’s elaborate. And overkill, especially for a park attraction.”

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to be an attraction,” Sarah said. “At least not totally. They’ll probably open it up to viewing, behind glass or something, but I think they are studying the wreck somehow.”

  Julie stood up and walked to Reggie’s mini fridge. “You mind?” she asked, tossing the question over her shoulder toward the man on the bed.

  “Not at all.”

  She opened it and found a two-shot bottle of Canadian Club. That’ll have to do, she thought. She twisted it open as she walked back to her chair. “Sarah — and I truly mean this with no offense — you’re an anthropologist, correct?”

  Sarah smiled. “None taken. Yes, you are correct. And I know what you’re all thinking — why should an anthropologist care about a shipwreck? That would be my father’s territory. Ancient mysteries, sunken below the sea, all that jazz, right?”

  Julie nodded.

  “Well the article mentioned that they had found things in the ship. Not just artifacts, like gold and silver, which they did find, but other things.”

  “Things… like what?” Ben asked.

  “Well, like people.”

  “People?”

  “Skeletons. Remnants of bones. Structural samplings that seem to imply the people inside the ship were mostly of Spanish descent.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Mostly,” she said, nodding. “And the rest was on the other pages of the article, so I don’t have a clear recollection of the details, how they did the testing, that sort of thing, but I do remember that the other major line of descent seemed to be Incan.”

  “Incan,” Reggie said. “Hmm.”

  “Yes,” she said. “My working hypothesis is that this ship was part of a treasure fleet, heading back to Spain, when it got caught in a storm and sank. There was treasure on board, surely, judging by the coins and artifacts that they found, but I believe the real treasure — the real reason this ship was booking it back to the motherland — was because of its human cargo. The skeletons.”

  22

  HUMAN CARGO. BEN WASN’T SURE why human cargo would have been important to the Spanish unless they planned on using the people as slaves, but he knew they didn’t have the full story yet. They really had no idea what was going on here, but Ben was getting the impression they were about to find out.

  “Julie, you should check the phone,” he said.

  Julie looked at him strangely for a second, then her eyes lit up. “I almost forgot about that! Yes, let’s check out this guy’s phone.”

  She held the phone up and waited for the lock screen to flash the prompt, waiting for the combination of numbers. She typed in the code the man had given her, 0-4-0-3-0-2, and watched.

  The lock screen changed to a home screen, with a row of folders and icons spread over the top three rows. There were the standard apps, like Settings, and Calendar, as well as some that she didn’t understand, and she assumed they were meant for the man’s work.

  “Any idea what we should check first?” Julie asked.

  “User information?” Reggie asked. “Maybe get a name?”

  She nodded, already flicking through the folders to find the Contacts app. She tapped it, opened the first entry labeled, ‘My Card,’ and started reading out loud. “Dr. Joseph Lin. Employed at OceanTech. Has a phone number and email address.”

  “Okay, Dr. Lin,” Reggie said, now strolling across the carpeted room. “What secrets do you have in store for us?”

  She kept reading, but none of the information was immediately useful. “Any other ideas?”

  “Pictures,” Ben said. “Find the pictures.”

  Ben watched Julie’s face as she navigated through the phone’s folders and screens. She found the app, and he watched what little part of the screen he could see as she opened the first album inside the app.

  Julie froze, and Ben noticed the hair on the back of her neck stand straight up. She gasped, then swallowed. She set the phone down on her knee as if it were suddenly hot, not wanting to touch it. But she didn’t look away.

  Ben leaned in to see, while Reggie ran toward them. Sarah, too, got off the bed and came over.

  Ben put a hand over his mouth. God, that’s disgusting. He held his hand there, not speaking.

  The image on the screen in front of Julie was of an arm. A human arm, laying out on an empty, metal table. There was no body attached to the arm, but it was clear that the arm had been recently detached.

  Clear, because the location where the arm would have met the shoulder had been wrenched free, skin and open muscle tissue bleeding and wretched over the entire open wound. A gash in the flesh showed the peeking end of bone, the head of the humerus. Ben wasn’t sure what to think. It was one thing to see an image of a limb on television, or in a textbook, or even in an online article. But on a person’s phone, an image that person took personally… that was something else entirely.

  “What the hell is that?” Reggie asked. “Is it real?”

  “Looks like it,” Sarah said. “And judging by the wound, it wasn’t surgically removed.”

  “Not unless ‘surgery’ to you means ‘brutally ripped apart.’”

  “Wow,” Julie said. “I can’t — I don’t…”

  “Jules, go to the next picture,” Ben said. He could see that there were tiny icons at the bottom of the phone’s screen, depicting more images in the series, though he couldn’t tell what they were.

  She did. The next picture was of the same arm, from another angle. This image showed more bruising, the purplish-black scarri
ng just beneath the skin of the upper arm. It looked to Ben as if a massive creature had grabbed the person’s arm and ripped it clean off the bone.

  But something in the picture caught Ben’s attention.

  “Go to the next picture,” he said. The others were gathered around Julie’s chair, looking down at the phone.

  She swiped to the right and the next image filled the screen. Ben’s suspicions were confirmed: this image was of the area right next to the arm, which was barely visible in the last image but in-focus on the screen in this one.

  It was the body the arm belonged to.

  “Yuck,” Reggie said. “I hate seeing dead bodies.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of them?” Sarah asked.

  He glanced at her. “Just a few.”

  The body was white, cold-looking and stiff. It was a shot of the torso, from the angle just above the severed arm, looking at the left side of the body the arm had come off of. There was a wound where the arm had been removed, but the wound appeared to have been cleaned and stitched up, unlike the arm’s open bloody gash. The shoulder on the torso looked enlarged from this angle, wider and taller than the opposite shoulder, and small bumps of bone pushed outward beneath the healing skin of the wound.

  “I agree with Reggie,” Ben said. “Yuck.”

  “What are we looking at here, doctor?” Reggie asked.

  Dr. Lindgren shook her head, but she didn’t take her eyes off the phone in Julie’s hand. “Your guess is as good as mine, guys. It’s a body, and it’s an arm. They’ve been removed from one another.”

  “An inquisitive observation, doctor,” Reggie said. No one laughed.

  “Seriously,” she added. “I’m an anthropologist. I don’t get to look at much more than old bones most of the time. My anatomy and mortician studies classes were just core curriculum, so I’m not really able to tell what’s going on here besides the obvious.”

  “If you had to guess?” Julie asked.

  “If I had to guess,” Sarah replied, “I’d say the person’s arm was removed violently. You can see where the bones snapped apart, and the tendons and muscle structure imply that there was severe trauma during the operation.”

  Ben nodded. “So this Lin fellow is a murderer.”

  “We don’t know that,” Reggie said. “He was involved in something here, that’s for sure, or he wouldn’t have come running down the hall, looking for help. And there’s a strong possibility that he was trying to clear his name — he did give you his phone and passcode, after all.”

  “Right,” Ben said, “but why? If he was involved in all of this, why come to us?”

  “We were the first people he saw?” Sarah asked.

  “Maybe. But aren’t there other people like him around? Staff, employees, something like that?”

  “Probably. Could be that he was here, in the hotel, instead of the lab for some reason. Didn’t Crawford say the hotel was the central ring and the second one was for the labs and staff quarters?”

  Ben nodded. “Any other pictures?” he asked.

  Julie flicked to the next image. This one was of another man, sitting, his back against a wall.

  “I think he’s still alive,” Sarah said. “His head is down, but it seems like he’s sleeping.”

  Ben realized she was right. He couldn’t tell why, but the man seemed to be in a deep sleep, but not dead. He was dark-skinned, naked, his right arm at his side. His right side was facing the camera, so Ben couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed as though —

  “He’s missing an arm,” Reggie said. “His left arm is gone.”

  “Can you tell from that angle?” Julie asked. “I can’t see it.” She pinched the screen and pulled her fingers apart, magnifying the image. The quality was good, and the image enlarged with little pixelation. Still, it was hard to tell.

  “I think,” Reggie said. “Go to the next one.”

  Julie scrolled to the next image, and this time Ben was sure. The picture was of a woman in the same type of space — three walls in view with a very low ceiling. A strangely small room, and the picture had been taken from below the woman, looking up at her. As if the cameraperson had been lying on the floor for the shot.

  “Guess that answers your question,” Sarah said.

  The woman was not sleeping or dead but wide awake, facing at the camera from her position sitting along the back wall. There was a blank expression on her face as she stared forward. She, too, was dark-skinned, her long black hair falling around her shoulders, untreated and shiny with oil but still scratchy from wear and little attention. The hair was long enough to drape her neck but not long enough to cover her naked breasts.

  And she was missing a leg.

  Julie’s head fell back a bit. Ben stared, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The woman didn’t seem upset, but she wasn’t happy either. Her emotion was something else entirely — it seemed to be nonexistent. Just an empty shell of a woman. She wasn’t trying to cover herself, nor did she seem to care that she was being photographed. She just… was.

  “Weird,” Ben said.

  “Very weird. She’s missing a leg, that guy was probably missing an arm…”

  “And the first guy was missing an arm and his life.”

  “What the hell is all of this?” Julie asked. “You think this is happening here?”

  Reggie shrugged, glancing at his watch. “No idea. I hope not. But it’s getting late, and no one ever solved a mystery when they were tired. Let’s get some sleep. We can check in with Mr. E first thing tomorrow morning, let him know what’s going on.”

  He looked around. Ben didn’t have any trouble with Reggie’s decision, though the nagging feeling of wanting to understand what this Dr. Joseph Lin fellow had gotten himself into was growing.

  It’ll have to wait, he thought. I could use some sleep. We all could.

  Julie yawned next to him, turning off the phone’s screen. She looked over at him.

  “Right,” Ben said. “Let’s relax a bit, get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a new day. We can get up early, check in with Mr. E, get a good breakfast in us, then see what this place is really about.”

  23

  THE MORNING CAME FAST. BEN half-expected to wake up and realize he was still in a dream. He felt as though he hadn’t slept at all, tossing and turning overnight until the sun’s brutal intensity burned through the open shades.

  He groaned, sitting up. I’m going to shut those before I go to bed tonight, he thought. He put his feet on the floor and waiting, stretching his back and neck. He was in his mid-thirties, but sometimes it felt as though he was nearing sixty. His body was in the best shape of his life thanks to an oppressive workout regimen designed by Reggie that he’d been following for the past six months, but he was realizing that the older he got the harder he had to work just to keep things working the way they were supposed to.

  Julie snored a quick snorting breath, then rolled over and flopped her arm over his pillow and spread to the middle of the bed. She was a selfish sleeper, taking up more than her fair share of space. Ben thought it was cute, but he never told her that. He watched her for a moment and smiled. He felt like they were still back on the cruise ship, waking up after a lazy day of sitting in the sun and in no hurry to begin all over again.

  But they weren’t on a cruise ship, nor was this a vacation. He would do his best to enjoy his time here with her, but he wanted to work. He wanted to find The Hawk — Vicente Garza — and the rest of his Ravenshadow goons, and he wanted to bring them in for justice. Or take care of it himself.

  It was a fanciful long shot, but the CSO had been created for this sort of work. Finding answers to pressing concerns that the US government couldn’t, wouldn’t, or shouldn’t get involved in. Things that needed more care than an untrained civilian could offer but didn’t necessarily need a special forces team.

  Ben, Reggie, and Julie — and previously Joshua Jefferson — had formed the backbone of the organization, becoming some sort of amalgamation be
tween treasure hunters, detectives, and citizen cops. Mr. E and his wife provided the top-level support, including financing and communications logistics, while the three remaining members of the team became the on-the-ground task force.

  So Ben wasn’t entirely sure what exactly they’d be doing here, but the mission, as it had been explained to them by their leader, was simple: figure out what OceanTech was doing here at their new institute, see if they could find Ravenshadow and the man responsible for the deaths of many people, and then… report in.

  It was the last part that Ben struggled with. He knew himself well. He wasn’t rash or reckless, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to restrain from taking matters into his own hands if they did happen across Vicente Garza. Worse, he wasn’t sure if Julie could restrain herself.

  He stood up and continued stretching, forcing those thoughts to the back of his mind. He had more important concerns for now, and the first order of business was taking care of business. He walked into the restroom and started to close the door.

  “You up?” he heard Julie say.

  He opened the door again. “Yeah. Why?”

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  He smiled again. “Not surprised. You’re a fatty in the morning.”

  “Hey,” she said. The tiredness ruined any feigned anger she was trying to muster.

  “I’ll call for room service,” Ben said. “I saw a menu on the desk. Looks like there’s pretty much no limit to what we can order.”

  Julie laughed, her voice deep and full of sleep. “Well, in that case, I want pancakes and waffles. You never get to order that, you know? It’s always one or the other.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve heard the speech.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  He closed the bathroom door and decided he’d call for room service now, using the phone in the bathroom, so it would be ready for them by the time he got out of the shower.

  He turned on the water, felt it, and saw that the jets were on both the wall and the ceiling, a significant step up from the trickle they’d had in the matchbook-sized restroom on the cruise ship. He sighed, knowing that no matter what today or tomorrow would bring, this shower would be a form of respite for him. He was a simple man, and a scalding hot shower was usually enough to calm his nerves.